Colin Rhinesmith

It’s been an amazing couple of months working in my new role at CCTV as Community Media Coordinator. I’ve been involved with an amazing project to connect people with the tools, skills and knowledge to become empowered within a network society. I’ve taught two really fun classes on blogging and participatory media. And I’ve met some incredible people from Cambridge and beyond who have volunteered their time and efforts to create a stronger and more welcoming community at CCTV.

Now it’s time to finish my thesis and begin the work of graduating from Emerson in May. I have an enormous amount of work ahead of me but I am ready for the challenge ahead. I am cutting back my hours at work to concentrate on my thesis and the remaining work for my classes. I’m a bit freaked but I know that’s probably natural.

OK, here we go . . .

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I thought I’d use this post to share some of the work that I’m currently involved in. I find that these periodic updates also help me to get my head around it all, particularly as the semester winds down.

Grad School

This semester at Emerson College, I’m taking one class, I’m involved in a directed study and I’ve started my year-long thesis project. Here are some updates:

Hub2: As I’ve noted previously, I’m involved in a course at Emerson College that is exploring civic engagement through the design and social use of virtual platforms. Hub2 is the umbrella program, that currently involves students enrolled in a day class (that I’m in) and a night course. I’ve blogged a bunch about our group project in SL here and also on my blog at Emerson College. Soon, I’ll be starting a research paper around issues involved in the course

Fair Use, Media and Education in the Digital Age: This directed study seeks to learn more about the challenges facing educators and students in sharing online access to copyrighted material. So far, I’ve explored a number of philosophical, political, and legal issues related to this ongoing balancing act between copyright holders and educators. I’m currently structuring ideas for my research paper due at the end of this semester.

Community Media in Transition: While I’m very lucky that I enjoy all of my courses at Emerson, my grad thesis is perhaps the most exciting part of my work this semester. I’ve refined the topic a bit. I began a study recently that seeks to understand the role of the community media center for those involved in this form of local media practice. The purpose is to challenge the notion that the community media center (Public Access TV) is no longer necessary because of the Internet. I’m grateful to those in access who have contributed to my thinking on this topic.

Paid Research and Digital Media Production

The Digital Lyceum: Also at Emerson College this semester, I am supporting two faculty members for a NEH grant-funded project to research mixed-reality event production in the humanities. The Digital Lyceum, seeks to develop best practices and to propose a sustainable model for producing these with the purpose of contributing to humanities scholarship.

Citizen Media Law Podcast: We’re off and running with our new podcast at the Citizen Media Law Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. I’ve had a lot of fun working on this project. We’re still experimenting with the format and look forward to seeing how it progresses.

Volunteer Service

Action Coalition for Media Education: The new ACME website launched this fall and we’ve been pushing our fundraiser at the site. There’s lots of activity there, including blogging from board members and others. I’m excited that we’ve been able to license our media education materials under a Creative Commons Attribution Nonommercial 3.0 Unported license.

Cambridge Community Television: I’ve been working with others in the Membership, Outreach and Advisory Committee on a report about our recent web survey of CCTV members. The survey was very successful and I thank everyone in the committee for their hard work.

For these reasons above, I haven’t had a lot of time to blog here. But, I look forward to being more active on this site as I head towards the home stretch in December. I’m also looking forward to my Television Culture and Communication Ethics and Diversity courses next semester, along with completing my grad thesis. A busy year and lots to be thankful for.

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“Upgrage! Boston” photo by Digital Lyceum

As I mentioned earlier, I’m working on a project at Emerson College to research best practices and propose a sustainable model for creating and facilitating “mixed reality” lecture-style events. We’re interested in connecting with others who have experience in this area, particularly those at colleges and universities who are using these technologies either in the classroom or for on-campus humanities events.

Here are some of the questions we are asking,

“How are universities using this technology to foster the group authoring of events? Is it being used at conferences? Is it being used in the classroom? Are people using simple text back channels, or more involved systems like Second Life or There.com. What is the future of this practice? And by documenting what is going on, can we help shape that future?”

To learn more visit Augmented Place.

[Disclosure: I’m working as a paid research assistant on this project]

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I just (for some reason) noticed that both the library at Emerson College, recently renamed after Dr. Shoo Iwasaki, the “internationally known environmentalist from Japan,” and the Media Services Center have blogs. This is great.

On the library blog, you can find a list of book recommendations, magazine/journal recommendations, and learn about art exhibitions featuring the work of Emerson College professors and others.

Over on the Media Services blog, Deja_Vu, Emerson students can find recommendations from their media collection and learn about featured films related to celebrations on campus.

It would be great if Deja Vu started to use tags like the Library blog does. This would helpful for searching the site based on topic areas. But, kudos to them for being open to using a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. It would be great if the library blog started to use a CC license, as well.

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This academic year, I will be working with Emerson College professors Eric Gordon and John Craig Freeman on an exciting new media project titled “Digital Lyceum” funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Here’s a bit from Eric’s recent blog post:

This project explores the virtual architecture of the live humanities event. In other words, we’re interested in identifying how back-channels (from virtual worlds to information streams) can enhance the learning and experiential capacity of a live lecture or performance . . .

In the short term, we have promised the NEH that we will research how this work is currently taking place and produce a website that includes best practices and ideas. We hope to communicate with those who are building tools and those who are implementing those tools in innovative ways. We hope to provide a resource for anyone interested in staging mixed reality events.

I’m setting up a number of online research tools for collaboration and hopefully to encourage public participation in this project. I’ve installed a WordPress blog at AugmentedPlace.org where we’ll be documenting our work and and sharing our findings online. After these project tools have been set-up, I’ll move towards compiling a list of resources for our database and best practices report.

It’s an exciting project that connects my digital media production background and research interests in this area. I’m looking forward to being part of the team.

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I’ve been working on a first pass at my directed study proposal for the fall. Here it is:

“Digital media, the Internet and copyright law present growing challenges to educators and academic institutions working to share access to teaching and learning resources inside and outside the classroom. But what is a classroom in the digital age? Where does the classroom begin and end when online learning materials become increasingly accessible through open, walled, and semi-walled gardens? This course will examine these and other questions, including:

• What is the mission of University?
• What are recommended Fair Use guidelines and best practices for educators and students in the digital age?
• What software platforms are being used and developed to encourage online sharing of educational materials while balancing the rights of copyright owners and concerns of academic institutions?

To investigate these issues, the course will be divided into three sections to further explore recent scholarship and innovative educational initiatives related to the topics above. The final project will result in a 25 page research paper. In conducting research for this study, the course will include a directed study blog incorporating del.icio.us links (and this wiki) to allow the instructor and the public at-large to participate in a collaborative learning environment.”

The wiki for the directed study is closed, but I will be setting up a blog which will be open for participation. More soon . . .

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Here are my notes from Brian Newman’s (ReNew Media) talk at at CCNMTL’s Video, Education, and Open Content conference:

ReNew Media is founded by Rockefeller Foundation to help media artists with funding their projects. ReNew offers Media Arts Scholarships and in this process they hear a lot about what filmmakers and media artists do not make (meaning $$) from their productions.

Media Artists and Open Content Current Paradigm

• Artists want: freedom to create their vision and Second is that they hope to make a living by doing so.
• They are under-funded in an over-produced field.
• Everyone thinks they will be discovered.
• There is limited thinking about distribution and educational use.
• No real numbers to tell you how little filmmakers are making on their films.
• Paid educational marketplace important
• Most not very aware of alternate licensing, or of open content movement
• Most are resistent to the notion of alternate licensing like CC
• Filmmakers and Distributors like payment and DRM
• No viable model which pays them for their work

ReNew thought about how to fund media artists’ work up front. Stipulation of funding was that the work had to transfer to an alternate licensing (Creative Commons, etc.) scheme after 5 years. In asking that question, they found that filmmakers and other media artists’ are open to those ideas.

They decided to give money to artists saying, “we’ll give you money up front” to make a short piece under a CC license. They got some great works which they premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. They have a contest that allows people to remix the work.

ReNew has contracted with Intelligent Television to study the economics of distribution. With the goal of finding out how much filmmakers are actually making, because there is no information here. Brian says there are really only about 4 or 5 people every year who are making money off of independent/documentary films.

Proposals for Open Video Finance

• It’s not black and white
• Need to enlarge our thinking and accept new ideas which combine our hopes and current realities
• Need for real numbers on funding, revenue from various markets and consumer/educational preferences
• Need viable models for open content - and very few, if any, exist

Philanthropy needs to think about new ways to fund open content projects.

ReNew is also working on a project called The Reframe Project, subtitled, “Making our visual Heritage accessible to all”.

There’s a lot of film stuck on the shelf that educators want to use which are not open. ReNew is interested in sustainable models for funding digitization and archival projects. They are working with Amazon on the project. The deal is non-exclusive. ReNew will help with digitization and they will give sources back as a DVD. Owners can take it back and make it free or sell it all on iTunes.

They are helping people with delivery through:

• DVD on demand
• Digital download to own or rent
• Variable time, users, prices (set by rights holder)
• Ingest on demand (through Amazon)

All of these processes are opt-in.

Brian also talked about the new Reframe website, which will include:

• Educational focus
• Curated - top down, bottom up
• Branded
• Participatory
• Recommendation systems (from Amazon)

They will also being doing a lot of work on rights issues. They are hoping it can become a nexus for people interested in these issues. They think this project will be a sustainable solution for long-term support.

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